#19: Stoking the embers
Plus Beef, complicated mothers and the Five Gates of Grief
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Greetings. Today is the 1st May, Beltane, signifying the return of the light and the start of summer, typically celebrated with fire. An appropriate day to reignite This Might Resonate, which has lain dormant for the past 14 months. During this period, I had been waiting for life to “calm down”, in the belief that I needed my ducks in a row in order to start writing again. It has slowly dawned on me that life may always be this chaotic, and if I wait for order, I’ll never write again.
So, here’s to beginning again, feeling rusty and stoking the embers of creativity, despite the more pressing items on our to-do lists.
Reading
Things I’ve been telling myself lately: “I promise your sort-of-small, often-ordinary life is enough. And if you ever want more, then go after more”.
Gorgeous writing: “Do I owe my mother – a woman who has suffered many injustices – a soothing performance, even if the ritual harms me?”
This is very much my approach to happiness: “So I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for [happiness]. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness – moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist”.
Rehab for billionaires. A companion piece to the final season of Succession.
Fungi, heterodoxy and systems: “… it's really important that we protect the minorities in our society. Scientific innovation does not come from the majority”.
This gorgeous interview with Michaela Coel, one of the most exciting artists around.
The May 2023 disability-focused edition of Vogue, which features four disabled cover stars, including one of my faves, Selma Blair.
Some fiction:
No One Is Talking About This (online discourse and family tragedy)
The Essex Serpent (Hot Priest, but make it 1893)
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (a love letter to the protagonist’s mother within a queer, Vietnamese immigrent story)
Acts of Service (beauty, sex, desire, taboo)
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (love, creativity, competition, disability).
Lots of non-fiction:
The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (a scholarly and empathetic excavation of how Western medicine fails those of us with chronic illness)
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (if you start this book Donne-ambivalent, you will end it a super-fan)
Enchantment: Reawakening Wonder in an Exhausted Age (everyone needs this book right now, trust me)
Rest is Resistance (understand your relationship with productivity and capitalism via Tricia Hersey’s teachings, informed by somatics, womanism, womanist theology, Black Liberation Theology, Afrofuturism, and her ancestors)
The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (exploring the Five Gates of Grief)
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (a jaw-dropping scandal, brilliantly investigated)
Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory (bodies, families and fame, from the writer of Women Talking)
Honourable mentions: Priestdaddy, The Outrun, No Bad Parts, Four Thousand Weeks, The Boy with the Topknot, Friendaholic. And, of course, Spare.
Watching
So much TV. My favourites from the past year or so:
Perfect art that has stayed with me: Station Eleven, Beef, Andor, The Bear, Succession, Happy Valley, The Last of Us, Better Things.
Enjoyable ways to pass the time: The Mandalorian, The White Lotus, Barry, Bad Sisters, Dreamland, A League of their Own, Fleishman is in Trouble, Derry Girls, Feel Good, You, Hacks, Shrinking, Ramy, Dopesick, WeCrashed, The Dropout, Pamela, a Love Story, Tiny Beautiful Things.
Still appreciating…
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